Toward Flexible Intelligence: MITI's New Program of Real World Computing

The Real World Computing (RWC) program is starting this year on a large scale as the successor to the Fifth Generation Computer project which formally ended in 1992. This is the next Japanese national project launched by M I T I (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) with a budget of over $ 500 million for ten years The reason why we dare call it "program" is that we intend to pursue more fundamental and generic technology in a new and wide framework of research and development different from the traditional M I T I projects which have mainly devoted themselves to the development of machines. Through the program, which is open to the world, it is also intended that Japan makes a greater international contribution to basic science and generic technology which should be the common property of mankind. The primary objective of the new program is to lay the theoretical foundation and to pursue the technological realization of human-like flexible and intelligent information processing as a new paradigm of information processing towards the highly information-based society of the 21st century. Contrary to that the Fifth Generation project pursued the aspect of logical (symbolbased) information processing (or intelligence) of humans, the RWC program is rather pursuing another aspect of intuttive (pattern-based) information processing as a new framework and foundation of information processing, and also aiming at unifying both aspects in a bottom-up manner. In this paper the outline of the Real World Computing program is introduced, referring to the background, concepts, and contents of the research and development of the program.